The future is here or how we perceive progress: to the 5th anniversary of one pessimistic post
I stumbled upon one post that was popular at the time (even at Habré), which just turns 5 years old: “There is no future or what progress stops” . The content of this post right now is particularly interesting, as an illustrative slice of habrasoobshchestva thinking at the end of the last decade, which can be compared with today and analyze - why habrayuser thought so, what they did not notice and, most importantly, what conclusions we can make about our current perception of the future and progress,
So, the year 2009 is in the yard - and few people know how this number is spelled in Italian. The iPad hasn't even been announced yet. The global economic crisis continues (although the bottom has already been passed), and in addition to it there is also swine flu. Netbooks are still being sold, they actively distribute and beg for invites to Google Wave, among geek smartphones especially read the Nokia N900 and few people may think that not only the Maemo project, but also all Nokia will soon appear. The green robot is already fighting with the apple for the market, and the concept of a smartphone as a platform with an app store has already emerged, but few still understand how destructive it will be for an established mobile zoo. The Internet and IT as a whole are already quite developed, social networks are gaining a wide audience along with games about farmers - the hottest topic at the time - but no one likes anyone yet. And nobody knows about the birds with pigs. Moreover, such things as crowdfunding, smart watches, fitness trackers and health services, MOOC and other educational activities are practically unknown. Something heard somewhere about SpaceX, generally "private space", "Internet of things", Tesla (still in doubt), 3D-printers, neural interfaces, and for mentioning "smart home" on Habré you can still grab a minus ... Everywhere mantra "modernization" and "ropish forward", and along with Habr Trendclub with Kotochas from the movie "Back to the Future" is gaining popularity, although its popularity without sponsorship will not be very long. Well, I hope many still remember this crazy time.
And now Garyan habrauser comes to mind with pessimistic thoughts, that everything is sad, because, you know, we still don’t plug connectors into our heads and don’t drive flying machines, and not because progress hasn’t reached this point yet. because we are all terrible conservatives, we are afraid of the new and do not want to master it, and therefore, they say, are doomed to crawl on the ground for a long time and so on. Well, in general, by themselves, these thoughts are not unique, more interesting examples, which the author in 2009 illustrates this:
1) The so-called flying car Moller Skycar. To my surprise, I discovered that for the first time I read about him not on the membrane, but in the magazine “Why?” No. 7 for 1991, I just forgot about it. Moller on the course of trying to put his brainchild "on the wing" is already 40 years old, and so far it turns out not very, although PR is nemeryannom. The author of the post for some reason decided that people stupidly did not want to buy efficient flying cars for a penny $ 60k because of their conservatism.
')
2) OCZ NIA - remember this? One of the first simple neural interfaces, still quite buggy. And not very popular a year after the release - which gives another +1 to the pessimism of the author. Later, Emotiv EPOC will appear, NeuroSky - more interesting toys for geeks, although even now, after 5 years, they have not yet become something as everyday as a mouse. But many probably already heard about them, or even held in their hands. In short, this technology is still at a very early stage of domestic distribution and is far from the “inflection point”.
3) Video communication - in this case, in mobile phones (including already smartphones with 1 and 2 android). Namely, its low popularity compared with the usual voice or text-based mobile communications in general. They say that science fiction writers have thought about how people will regularly fully communicate via videophones, but people, bitches, conservatives - do not want to.
What can I say to that? Even in 2009, I looked at this phenomenon in the opposite way: it was not people who were conservatives, but the opposite — it was the science fiction of the past who had a limited vision of the future, because they were repelled from their values and needs of the time. From our point of view, this is not the future, but just an amusing, not very well-adjusted extrapolation of the past. When this unadjustedness begins to strike the eye, the “future” turns into a retro, albeit futuristic.
Further, the author cites two more particularly amusing examples by today's standards:
4) Readers with e-ink screens (which essentially embodied the transition from paper books to electronic books in the pre-tablet era) - it turns out that a survey was conducted on one glamorous website at that time and a considerable part of users were skeptical about the purchase of such a device. But this is according to a poll, and what happened in reality, we all see the tablet market and the tendency to increase the screens of phones. And although paper books are still held in high esteemby hipsters , the prospects of electronic are no longer in doubt.
This example shows that conservatism exists mainly in the minds and tends to evaporate as the practical development of certain technologies.
5) Touch screen (in this case, the author mentioned it casually on the example of tables like Surface - remember when this word was associated exclusively with expensive, cumbersome and cool solutions, and not with expensive, but senseless tablets under WinRT?). Let me remind you that the tablets as such did not exist yet. By the way, even after the announcement of the first iPad, there were fierce disputes on the same Habre, who needs it and why :).
So who are the conservatives in this case?
I will now show why I believe that conservatism is more in retro-futuristic templates (that is, in the very idea that the future is flying machines, videophones, solid 3D and all that) than in the pursuit of real people for convenience and solving practical problems, and That Future 2.0 is a bit like Future 1.0, does not make it any less future.
Have you ever wondered why, around the middle of the 20th century, the future began to envision the future massively? That the cars will fly, the telephones will show the image, with color and preferably three-dimensional, the food will be in tablets (although this refers to slightly earlier attempts at forecasts) and so on? However, few science fiction writers paid attention to IT and mobile communications. Even advanced futurologists very seldom described something similar to our Internet today, and it looked like a gigantic media library of content already created by someone, but they couldn’t imagine something similar to our social networks and what was going on in them. .
The reason is that all these ideas about the future were essentially an extrapolation of the then needs of people with psychology of that time, who have certain experience in using certain technologies. This is most conveniently explained by the example of a videophone.
For a person of the past, the phone was still a rather rare, expensive and not very convenient opportunity to contact another person (especially from another city or country), especially if you look from our time. Today we can do it, wherever we are, if there is a mobile connection. But a person of the 20th century had no such experience. For him, only two types of communication were familiar:
1) the real. You need to physically approach a person, turn to him properly and talk (in European culture - usually looking at his eyes and not anywhere else). From the appearance of the idea to the real contact, some time will pass, depending on where this person is located;
2) telephone. You need to physically go to the phone and wait for the connection. Again, before the contact may take time - a person may be absent where the phone is located.
That is, in any case, for communication, it was necessary to go somewhere and spend time, sometimes money. At the same time, in real life such costly contact was often more productive, primarily due to visual possibilities. All human culture was originally sharpened precisely for such a complex resource-intensive communication with nonverbalism. When the phone appeared, it seemed miserable and inconvenient. But inconvenient not because of the fact that it cannot be carried with him, but because the interlocutor is not visible! Because the experience of mobile communication in humanity was absent in principle, and the experience of "full contact", on the contrary, dominated! And when the experience of remote, but only voice communication was added to this experience, the futurists in their dreams wanted to combine it - that is, that the contact was both full and remote!
It didn’t even occur to them that, in practice, with the development of telephone communication, it will be less and less perceived as a surrogate for “full contact”, and will begin to form its own culture of voice communication, and especially with the transition to mobility — first in the form of radio tubes, then full-fledged cellular communication. - this culture will increasingly distance itself from the “real”, gain such popularity as asynchronous, silent and therefore a convenient form of communication, like SMS (albeit the most expensive in terms of bytes!), And by the time technology makes it possible Video call - mobile and penny! - it will just occupy a separate niche, as well as “real”, since for a significant part of the tasks there will be enough text or voice. And most importantly, for us in the 21st century, it will be quite comfortable!
In principle, they could be understood. Try to imagine a world where everyone has the opportunity to instantly start a telepathy session at the level of thought flows at high speed. For example, when programmers discuss the architecture of some software, how fast the exchange of ideas and their development can become. And that in this world, people use this opportunity to the left and to the right as much as we can be shocked. Well, for example, they broadcast what is happening in their heads during sex on the network for money (or for free, and they take money for two-way communication :)). Or not for money, but for huskies or some other exotic services that, from our point of view, are delusional. In general, something like this for them in the past would look like our today's world of mobile communications, broadband Internet, social networks and skype. Imagine what intellectual efforts were required to at least imagine such a world in those years. Not to mention the fact that this kind of fiction would be difficult to understand, boring, unpopular or insulting the “traditional values” of those years. It is much easier to imagine a videophone or fax on every corner: “McFly, YOU ARE FIRED!”
Who is the conservative? A 14-year-oldlicorice store, who sends 90 sms a day, calls 9 dudes and even undresses in front of another one in webmoney, or rather, who thought she would be discussing homework exclusively on a stationary videophone? :)
The future of 1.0 is about what we wanted yesterday.
The future of 2.0 is about what we want tomorrow. It is harder to imagine, but it has a lot more to do with a real tomorrow.
In anticipation of the future, those who can abstract themselves from today's and yesterday's needs and not perceive them as if they always will be able to anticipate the future. In this, I fundamentally disagree with the author from 2009, who argued that the future is made by those needs that already existed in the past. Although at the most basic level they can be reduced to one of several general categories (or even two, for example, "material" and "intangible"), in this case it is important what form their evolution will take. Will the need for communication manifest itself in the form of "full contact" or through separate channels of text and voice; what needs will be further met by neural interfaces, 3D printing, crowdfunding, or the same flying cars.
An example of the conservatism of fiction and futurologists of the past with regard to videophone and mobile communications is not the only one. Even more revealing is the evolution of life expectancy and reproductive behavior of people in science fiction, socio-economic and sexual relations and how these things are often presented by the authors of the 20th century.
It would seem that the task of science fiction is to explore the most diverse scenarios of the development of technologies as radically as you please. In NF-works, people fly on the most diverse ships between stars and galaxies, travel in time, according to alternative measurements, etc., they encounter any exotic distortions of physics. But at the same time, they behave as if chronically stuck in some 1950s. In Western fiction, this includes socio-economic relations, in Soviet they are evolving towards communism, but the deeper psychology remains the same. Perhaps only Lem managed to disperse a fantastic imagination to something more interesting, although he is a man of his time.
In particular, with all the inclination to describe the arrogantly intricate expansion of humanity in space, the 20th century fiction writers for some reason reluctantly describe such a banal direction as an increase in life expectancy. Often, they have immortal or very long living characters that are hostile or “alien” in character, often strongly contrasted with “ordinary” people. The same applies to modified people, mutants, cyborgs, people with enhanced intelligence, and so on. But if a sci-fi shows constructive behavior on some aspect, then he either criticizes or ignores others. As for the futurists-visionaries, an example that FM-2030, one of the most radical futurologists of the last century, described is indicative - when he was at a conference of similarly selected futurists-radicals sometime in the 1960s, he would like to live longer then a few single hands went up. True, by the 80s there were more of them (in the respective circles). Well, in science fiction only recently, in the 21st century, works began to appear, in which overdueness and other significant changes of a person are served in a constructive manner, and not necessarily in the "mentor", when the more advanced ultimately pull behind the laggards, but more comprehensively. I have some thoughts on why this started happening right now, but this is a separate topic.
In this topic we will conclude that there are probably some predictable bugs in the perception of the expected future by most people, tied to their current lifestyle, practical experience, biological, social and technological realities that direct their thoughts about the future in one direction. (video call, 3D), while reality moves with time in others (mobile communication, SMS). And what is possible in principle to anticipate this reality to a greater extent than most people, if you know how to abstract, think in a complex way and identify sources of current needs and potential drivers of their evolution. And what have the far space and ultra-longevity, I will tell you next time.
In conclusion, I recommend re-reading the comments 5 years ago (better in the mobile version , there are no UFOs closed :)) and be surprised at the community pessimism and mass delusions (compared to today), and at the same time remember how many new things we have in these 5 years old.
See you in the future!
So, the year 2009 is in the yard - and few people know how this number is spelled in Italian. The iPad hasn't even been announced yet. The global economic crisis continues (although the bottom has already been passed), and in addition to it there is also swine flu. Netbooks are still being sold, they actively distribute and beg for invites to Google Wave, among geek smartphones especially read the Nokia N900 and few people may think that not only the Maemo project, but also all Nokia will soon appear. The green robot is already fighting with the apple for the market, and the concept of a smartphone as a platform with an app store has already emerged, but few still understand how destructive it will be for an established mobile zoo. The Internet and IT as a whole are already quite developed, social networks are gaining a wide audience along with games about farmers - the hottest topic at the time - but no one likes anyone yet. And nobody knows about the birds with pigs. Moreover, such things as crowdfunding, smart watches, fitness trackers and health services, MOOC and other educational activities are practically unknown. Something heard somewhere about SpaceX, generally "private space", "Internet of things", Tesla (still in doubt), 3D-printers, neural interfaces, and for mentioning "smart home" on Habré you can still grab a minus ... Everywhere mantra "modernization" and "ropish forward", and along with Habr Trendclub with Kotochas from the movie "Back to the Future" is gaining popularity, although its popularity without sponsorship will not be very long. Well, I hope many still remember this crazy time.
And now Garyan habrauser comes to mind with pessimistic thoughts, that everything is sad, because, you know, we still don’t plug connectors into our heads and don’t drive flying machines, and not because progress hasn’t reached this point yet. because we are all terrible conservatives, we are afraid of the new and do not want to master it, and therefore, they say, are doomed to crawl on the ground for a long time and so on. Well, in general, by themselves, these thoughts are not unique, more interesting examples, which the author in 2009 illustrates this:
1) The so-called flying car Moller Skycar. To my surprise, I discovered that for the first time I read about him not on the membrane, but in the magazine “Why?” No. 7 for 1991, I just forgot about it. Moller on the course of trying to put his brainchild "on the wing" is already 40 years old, and so far it turns out not very, although PR is nemeryannom. The author of the post for some reason decided that people stupidly did not want to buy efficient flying cars for a penny $ 60k because of their conservatism.
')
2) OCZ NIA - remember this? One of the first simple neural interfaces, still quite buggy. And not very popular a year after the release - which gives another +1 to the pessimism of the author. Later, Emotiv EPOC will appear, NeuroSky - more interesting toys for geeks, although even now, after 5 years, they have not yet become something as everyday as a mouse. But many probably already heard about them, or even held in their hands. In short, this technology is still at a very early stage of domestic distribution and is far from the “inflection point”.
3) Video communication - in this case, in mobile phones (including already smartphones with 1 and 2 android). Namely, its low popularity compared with the usual voice or text-based mobile communications in general. They say that science fiction writers have thought about how people will regularly fully communicate via videophones, but people, bitches, conservatives - do not want to.
What can I say to that? Even in 2009, I looked at this phenomenon in the opposite way: it was not people who were conservatives, but the opposite — it was the science fiction of the past who had a limited vision of the future, because they were repelled from their values and needs of the time. From our point of view, this is not the future, but just an amusing, not very well-adjusted extrapolation of the past. When this unadjustedness begins to strike the eye, the “future” turns into a retro, albeit futuristic.
Further, the author cites two more particularly amusing examples by today's standards:
4) Readers with e-ink screens (which essentially embodied the transition from paper books to electronic books in the pre-tablet era) - it turns out that a survey was conducted on one glamorous website at that time and a considerable part of users were skeptical about the purchase of such a device. But this is according to a poll, and what happened in reality, we all see the tablet market and the tendency to increase the screens of phones. And although paper books are still held in high esteem
This example shows that conservatism exists mainly in the minds and tends to evaporate as the practical development of certain technologies.
5) Touch screen (in this case, the author mentioned it casually on the example of tables like Surface - remember when this word was associated exclusively with expensive, cumbersome and cool solutions, and not with expensive, but senseless tablets under WinRT?). Let me remind you that the tablets as such did not exist yet. By the way, even after the announcement of the first iPad, there were fierce disputes on the same Habre, who needs it and why :).
So who are the conservatives in this case?
I will now show why I believe that conservatism is more in retro-futuristic templates (that is, in the very idea that the future is flying machines, videophones, solid 3D and all that) than in the pursuit of real people for convenience and solving practical problems, and That Future 2.0 is a bit like Future 1.0, does not make it any less future.
Have you ever wondered why, around the middle of the 20th century, the future began to envision the future massively? That the cars will fly, the telephones will show the image, with color and preferably three-dimensional, the food will be in tablets (although this refers to slightly earlier attempts at forecasts) and so on? However, few science fiction writers paid attention to IT and mobile communications. Even advanced futurologists very seldom described something similar to our Internet today, and it looked like a gigantic media library of content already created by someone, but they couldn’t imagine something similar to our social networks and what was going on in them. .
The reason is that all these ideas about the future were essentially an extrapolation of the then needs of people with psychology of that time, who have certain experience in using certain technologies. This is most conveniently explained by the example of a videophone.
For a person of the past, the phone was still a rather rare, expensive and not very convenient opportunity to contact another person (especially from another city or country), especially if you look from our time. Today we can do it, wherever we are, if there is a mobile connection. But a person of the 20th century had no such experience. For him, only two types of communication were familiar:
1) the real. You need to physically approach a person, turn to him properly and talk (in European culture - usually looking at his eyes and not anywhere else). From the appearance of the idea to the real contact, some time will pass, depending on where this person is located;
2) telephone. You need to physically go to the phone and wait for the connection. Again, before the contact may take time - a person may be absent where the phone is located.
That is, in any case, for communication, it was necessary to go somewhere and spend time, sometimes money. At the same time, in real life such costly contact was often more productive, primarily due to visual possibilities. All human culture was originally sharpened precisely for such a complex resource-intensive communication with nonverbalism. When the phone appeared, it seemed miserable and inconvenient. But inconvenient not because of the fact that it cannot be carried with him, but because the interlocutor is not visible! Because the experience of mobile communication in humanity was absent in principle, and the experience of "full contact", on the contrary, dominated! And when the experience of remote, but only voice communication was added to this experience, the futurists in their dreams wanted to combine it - that is, that the contact was both full and remote!
It didn’t even occur to them that, in practice, with the development of telephone communication, it will be less and less perceived as a surrogate for “full contact”, and will begin to form its own culture of voice communication, and especially with the transition to mobility — first in the form of radio tubes, then full-fledged cellular communication. - this culture will increasingly distance itself from the “real”, gain such popularity as asynchronous, silent and therefore a convenient form of communication, like SMS (albeit the most expensive in terms of bytes!), And by the time technology makes it possible Video call - mobile and penny! - it will just occupy a separate niche, as well as “real”, since for a significant part of the tasks there will be enough text or voice. And most importantly, for us in the 21st century, it will be quite comfortable!
In principle, they could be understood. Try to imagine a world where everyone has the opportunity to instantly start a telepathy session at the level of thought flows at high speed. For example, when programmers discuss the architecture of some software, how fast the exchange of ideas and their development can become. And that in this world, people use this opportunity to the left and to the right as much as we can be shocked. Well, for example, they broadcast what is happening in their heads during sex on the network for money (or for free, and they take money for two-way communication :)). Or not for money, but for huskies or some other exotic services that, from our point of view, are delusional. In general, something like this for them in the past would look like our today's world of mobile communications, broadband Internet, social networks and skype. Imagine what intellectual efforts were required to at least imagine such a world in those years. Not to mention the fact that this kind of fiction would be difficult to understand, boring, unpopular or insulting the “traditional values” of those years. It is much easier to imagine a videophone or fax on every corner: “McFly, YOU ARE FIRED!”
Who is the conservative? A 14-year-old
The future of 1.0 is about what we wanted yesterday.
The future of 2.0 is about what we want tomorrow. It is harder to imagine, but it has a lot more to do with a real tomorrow.
In anticipation of the future, those who can abstract themselves from today's and yesterday's needs and not perceive them as if they always will be able to anticipate the future. In this, I fundamentally disagree with the author from 2009, who argued that the future is made by those needs that already existed in the past. Although at the most basic level they can be reduced to one of several general categories (or even two, for example, "material" and "intangible"), in this case it is important what form their evolution will take. Will the need for communication manifest itself in the form of "full contact" or through separate channels of text and voice; what needs will be further met by neural interfaces, 3D printing, crowdfunding, or the same flying cars.
An example of the conservatism of fiction and futurologists of the past with regard to videophone and mobile communications is not the only one. Even more revealing is the evolution of life expectancy and reproductive behavior of people in science fiction, socio-economic and sexual relations and how these things are often presented by the authors of the 20th century.
It would seem that the task of science fiction is to explore the most diverse scenarios of the development of technologies as radically as you please. In NF-works, people fly on the most diverse ships between stars and galaxies, travel in time, according to alternative measurements, etc., they encounter any exotic distortions of physics. But at the same time, they behave as if chronically stuck in some 1950s. In Western fiction, this includes socio-economic relations, in Soviet they are evolving towards communism, but the deeper psychology remains the same. Perhaps only Lem managed to disperse a fantastic imagination to something more interesting, although he is a man of his time.
In particular, with all the inclination to describe the arrogantly intricate expansion of humanity in space, the 20th century fiction writers for some reason reluctantly describe such a banal direction as an increase in life expectancy. Often, they have immortal or very long living characters that are hostile or “alien” in character, often strongly contrasted with “ordinary” people. The same applies to modified people, mutants, cyborgs, people with enhanced intelligence, and so on. But if a sci-fi shows constructive behavior on some aspect, then he either criticizes or ignores others. As for the futurists-visionaries, an example that FM-2030, one of the most radical futurologists of the last century, described is indicative - when he was at a conference of similarly selected futurists-radicals sometime in the 1960s, he would like to live longer then a few single hands went up. True, by the 80s there were more of them (in the respective circles). Well, in science fiction only recently, in the 21st century, works began to appear, in which overdueness and other significant changes of a person are served in a constructive manner, and not necessarily in the "mentor", when the more advanced ultimately pull behind the laggards, but more comprehensively. I have some thoughts on why this started happening right now, but this is a separate topic.
In this topic we will conclude that there are probably some predictable bugs in the perception of the expected future by most people, tied to their current lifestyle, practical experience, biological, social and technological realities that direct their thoughts about the future in one direction. (video call, 3D), while reality moves with time in others (mobile communication, SMS). And what is possible in principle to anticipate this reality to a greater extent than most people, if you know how to abstract, think in a complex way and identify sources of current needs and potential drivers of their evolution. And what have the far space and ultra-longevity, I will tell you next time.
In conclusion, I recommend re-reading the comments 5 years ago (better in the mobile version , there are no UFOs closed :)) and be surprised at the community pessimism and mass delusions (compared to today), and at the same time remember how many new things we have in these 5 years old.
See you in the future!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/363631/
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